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Sesame1982--Gullivers

Sesame Street's Bert as Gulliver in The Sesame Street Storytime Calendar 1982 (Random House) illustrated by Michael J. Smollin.

A list of references made to Gulliver's Travels made in other media.

Sequels and imitations[]

  • Many sequels followed the initial publishing of the Travels. The earliest of these was the anonymously authored Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput[1], published in 1727, which expands the account of Gulliver's stays in Lilliput and Blefuscu by adding several gossipy anecdotes about scandalous episodes at the Lilliputian court.
  • Abbé Pierre Desfontaines, the first French translator of Swift's story, wrote a sequel, Le Nouveau Gulliver ou Voyages de Jean Gulliver, fils du capitaine Lemuel Gulliver (The New Gulliver, or the travels of John Gulliver, son of Captain Lemuel Gulliver), published in 1730[2]. Gulliver's son has various fantastic, satirical adventures.
  • The Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy (1887–1938) wrote two novels in which a 20th-century Gulliver visits imaginary lands. One, Utazás Faremidóba (i.e. Voyage to Faremido) (1916), recounts a trip to a land with almost robot-like, metallic beings whose lives are ruled by science, not emotion, and who communicate through a language based on musical notes. The second, Capillaria (1921), is a satirical comment on male-female relationships. It involves a trip by Gulliver to a world where all the intelligent beings are female, males being reduced to nothing more than their reproductive function.
  • Vladimir Savchenko published Gulliver's Fifth Travel - The Travel of Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships to the Land of Tikitaks - a sequel to the original series in which Gulliver's role as a surgeon is more apparent. Tikitaks are people who inject the juice of a unique fruit to make their skin transparent, as they consider people with regular opaque skin secretive and ugly.
  • The novel Castaways in Lilliput (1958) by Henry Winterfeld is about three normal-sized children who land in a modern version of Lilliput.
  • Davy King's 1978 short story "The Woman Gulliver Left Behind"[3] is a sort of satirical feminist spin on the tale, telling it from the point of view of Gulliver's wife. Alison Fell's novel "The Mistress of Lilliput" does likewise: Mary Gulliver goes travelling herself.
  • In 1998, the Argentine writer Edgar Brau published El último Viaje del capitán Lemuel Gulliver (Captain Lemuel Gulliver´s Last Travel), a novel in which Swift´s character is presented on an imaginary fifth journey, this time into the River Plate. It satirizes ways and customs of present day society, including sports, television, politics, etc. To justify the parody, the narrative is set immediately after the last voyage written by Swift (precisely, 1722), and the literary style of the original work is kept throughout the whole story.
  • The British children's book Mr Majeika on the Internet (2001) by Humphrey Carpenter includes modernized parallels to the lands of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Laputans and Houyhnhnms, as well as a mouse named Gulliver.
  • Adam Roberts' novel Swiftly (2008) is set 120 years after Gulliver's time and shows a world where the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu are now slaves of the British, and the Brobdingnagians are allied to France in a war against Britain.

Gulliver[]

  • In Alan Moore's comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gulliver was the unofficial leader of an early incarnation of the League which also included The Scarlet Pimpernel, Dr. Syn and Fanny Hill.
  • The character of Gulliver appears in the Doctor Who story The Mind Robber, played by Bernard Horsfall. He speaks only dialogue from the original book (though some speeches are patched together from widely separated sections).
  • The character of Gulliver is mentioned in Joy Kogawa's poem "What Do I Remember of the Evacuation". Gulliver appears in what could be read as a figment of the author's imagination. However, a more profound meaning could be determined depending on the discretion of the reader.

Lilliputians[]

  • The novel Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) by T. H. White features descendants of Lilliputians that were captured and brought to England.
  • The TV series The Return of the Antelope (Granada Television) centres on the adventures of three Lilliputian sailors shipwrecked in England. The series was subsequently made into the stories The Return of the Antelope (1985) and its sequels The Antelope Company Ashore (1986) and The Antelope Company at Large (1987), all by Willis Hall. Republished as The Secret Visitors, The Secret Visitors Take Charge, and The Secret Visitors Fight Back.
  • The comic book series Fables (2002-) has a city called "Smalltown" which was founded by self-exiled Lilliputian soldiers. All small Fables (not just Lilliputians) have a tendency to refer to normal-sized people as "gullivers" or as being "gulliver-sized".
  • In early printings of The Hobbit, hobbits are contrasted (in size) with Lilliputians. The reference was removed in the third edition.

Houyhnhnms[]

  • In John Myers Myers' novel Silverlock, the protagonist, A. Clarence Shandon, encounters the Houyhnhnms, and is dismissed by them as a Yahoo.
  • In Jorge Luis Borges' short story "El informe de Brody", an English character named Brody describes his observations with the yahoo people, expanding the accounts of Gulliver. However, the Houyhnhms are not mentioned.

Allusions[]

  • Philip K. Dick's short story "Prize Ship" (1954) loosely referred to Gulliver's Travels.[4]
  • Salman Rushdie refers to a country called Lilliput-Blefuscu in his novel Fury.
  • Hayao Miyazaki's anime film Laputa: Castle in the Sky is about a mythical flying island.
  • Rutherford Calhoun, the fictional narrator of Charles R. Johnson's novel Middle Passage briefly alludes to the Brobdingnagians.
  • In the 9th book of The Time Wars Series, Simon Hawke's The Lilliput Legion, the protagonists meet Lemuel Gulliver and battle the titular army.[5]
  • In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag briefly reads a section of Gulliver's Travels to his wife, who insists that it makes no sense. The section read is "It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end."
  • In the anime series Digimon Adventure 02 of the popular Digimon franchise, episode 28 referred to Iori who compared it to that of the Giga House that they were in.
  • In the novel Waves, by Ogan Gurel, Chapter 6 (Happiness) includes a descriptive scene in which a fantastically microscopic 'Dr. Lilliput' (a cross between Gulliver and the Lilliputians) travels inside the brain touching cells and proteins.
  • In an episode of Midsomer Murders, "Small Mercies", one of the victims is found murdered tied down like Gulliver in Lilliput.
  • Online MMORPG Latale has a town named Lilliput. To the right of this town, one may fight boats of the Lilliput army. Everything in the town is miniature, probably about 1/12 the size of your character.
  • SNES RPG, Mother 2 (EarthBound in US) has a "Your Sanctuary" location called "Lilliput Steps", it is a series of small footprints.
  • The third page in Francisco Goya's Bordeaux Album I (also known as Album H), one of eight albums of personal drawings created by the Spanish artist, is entitled "Gran coloso durmido (Large giant asleep)." It depicts the large head of a sleeping man, with dozens of miniature people next to and on him, having used ladders to climb up. According to the Goya expert Pierre Gassier (1915–2000) in his catalogue raisonné of Goya's personal album drawings[6], Goya was directly inspired by Part I, Chapter I of Gulliver's Travels.
  • In the third season episode "Evolution" of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard mentions thinking of Gulliver's story, feeling overpowered by Lilliputians, as the Enterprise was being taken over by Nanites.
  • Jane Eyre - throughout the first few chapters Jane reads from Gulliver's Travels.

Sources[]

  1. [1]
  2. [2]
  3. http://www.davyking.com/The%20Woman%20Gulliver%20Left%20Behind.pdf
  4. Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick: Volume One, Beyond Lies The Wub, Philip K. Dick, 1999, Millennium, an imprint of Orion Publishing Group, London
  5. The Lilliput Legion, Simon Hawke, 1989, Ace Books, New York, NY
  6. Gassier, Pierre. Les Dessins de Goya: Les Albums. Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1973.
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